Swing state Colorado holds its sway in 2012 presidential election

Candidates statistically tied in Colorado, which could tip Obama-Romney race

(Left) Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden, during a grass-roots rally at Arvada West High School Saturday morning. (Right) Ann Romney gives husband Mitt a hug as he took the stage to address thousands of supporters at the Comfort Dental Amphitheatre on Saturday night. (Andy Cross and Karl Gehring, The Denver Post)

ENGLEWOOD — With only two days left until Election Day, there is a poetic symmetry to the presidential race in Colorado.

It is now as it began.

The final Denver Post poll of the cycle finds the race effectively tied in Colorado. President Barack Obama holds a 2-percentage-point lead over challenger Mitt Romney in a survey with a 3.8 percent margin of error.

That is the same lead for Obama — the exact same numbers, even, 47 percent to 45 percent — that a Public Policy Polling survey found in December when it pitted Obama against Romney, before Romney was the GOP nominee and Obama had started formally campaigning.

Voters in the poll trust Romney more to fix the economy and reduce the federal debt; they say creating new jobs is the most important issue facing the country. They believe Obama is more in touch with the average working person and that it is very important for a president to be so.

As pollster SurveyUSA, which conducted the poll for The Post, repeatedly wrote in a memo, "This number has not budged in three tracking polls."

At rallies in Englewood and Arvada on Saturday, where Romney and Vice President Joe Biden, respectively, addressed roaring crowds, the messages were finely honed — a mixture of inspiration and attack.

Romney opened his rally at Comfort Dental Amphitheatre in Englewood, before a crowd of 17,000, with a sustained attack on Obama. Romney said Obama has failed to live up to promises on the budget deficit, job growth and economic recovery, and he criticized Obama by arguing that the president has worsened gridlock in Washington.

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"Change can't be measured in speeches," he said. "It is measured in achievements."

Romney, who spoke earlier in the day in Colorado Springs, positioned himself as a practical problem-solver, someone who would work with both parties to find solutions.

Biden largely drew on his stump speech for the month of October, calling Romney out of touch on women's issues and regressive in a "trickle- down" tax policy that will only hurt average people.

Biden also attempted to paint Romney as an inconsistent and untrustworthy candidate because he has changed his positions on abortion rights, climate change and other issues.

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"It's Mitt Romney's favorite time of the year because he gets to turn the clock back," Biden said Saturday in Arvada, referring to this weekend's shift from daylight-saving time to standard time. "He wants to turn the clock back so desperately, this time tonight he can really do it."

Biden's Arvada rally drew 900. He drew another 1,200 in a later rally in Pueblo. In his speeches, he predicted a bright future under Obama.

"I'm more optimistic about America's chances now than I was when I was elected when I was 29 years old," Biden said in Arvada.

The Post's poll gives Democrats reason to be optimistic about the election.

The survey finds 59 percent of respondents say they have already voted, while another 21 percent say they will vote before Election Day. Among those who have already voted, Obama leads 49 percent to 46 percent, and he leads 45 percent to 42 percent among those who say they will vote before Tuesday.

Only with Election Day voters — 18 percent of respondents — does Romney lead, 47 percent to 42 percent.

"For Romney to win, a number of early Obama voters must turn out to be 'poseurs' and the number of Election Day Romney voters must be larger than here shown," SurveyUSA writes in its memo.

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That fits with Democratic statements about early voting strength — the Obama campaign released numbers Saturday noting the president leads by 10 points among those who have already voted, according to Keating Research, a Colorado Democratic pollster, and that early turnout is up among Latinos and African-Americans compared with 2008.

But it contradicts numbers released Saturday by the Colorado secretary of state's office that show Republicans with a roughly 2-percentage-point lead over Democrats in early votes cast — 605,586 ballots to 567,569 ballots. An American Research Group poll released last week showed that voters who planned to vote early favored Romney 52 percent to 47 percent.

"I have a hard time reconciling the top-line results in the poll with the early-voting numbers that we're seeing," said Colorado State University political science professor Bob Duffy. "... I guess we have to wait until Election Day."

It has been a long wait in Colorado.

It began in January, with a 15-minute speech inside an airplane hangar and Air Force One waiting outside.

Officially, Obama's appearance before about 400 uniformed service members at Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora was to reinforce the themes of his State of the Union speech, given two days before. But his words made clear he was messaging for November.

"If we work together in common purpose, nobody can stop us," he told the crowd. "We will rebuild this economy. We will meet these challenges."

And, thus, as a Sousa march played Obama off the stage, the 2012 campaign season in Colorado had begun. Nine days later, Mitt Romney spoke before 700 people in Colorado Springs on his way to winning the Republican nomination, despite losing the Colorado GOP caucus.

"We elected this president to lead," Romney said then. "He chose to follow. Now it's time for him to get out of the way."

Over the next nine months, the candidates and their running mates have attended 42 more campaign events in Colorado. They've spoken — in rallies as small as a few hundred people and as big as more than 10,000 — before roughly 165,000 people combined, enough to populate a city bigger than Fort Collins.

The campaigns and outside groups focusing on the presidential race have spent close to $60 million on television ads in Colorado, according to a Washington Post analysis of national ad spending. It's enough to repair about 48 miles of road or pay the salaries of more than 1,200 teachers.

The race saturated Colorado.

Since mid-October, Obama campaign staffers say they have knocked on more than 1.5 million doors. Romney officials say their team in Colorado has made more than 2 million voter contacts — both by phone and in person — since late September. The state has about 3.6 million registered voters, of which 2.7 million are considered active, meaning it is more likely than not that a voter in Colorado has heard directly from one of the campaigns.

"We never left Colorado four years ago," Obama campaign adviser Craig Hughes wrote in an Oct. 26 memo, "but instead we have maintained an ongoing conversation with voters and methodically assembled the most robust organization in Colorado history."

"The office has been packed ever since it opened," Romney's Colorado campaign director, James Garcia, said of the campaign's state headquarters. "It is a function of the support level for Mitt."

And, yet, after all those visits and all that money and all that effort and all that chaos, the race in Colorado remains fundamentally the same as when it began.

On Sunday and Monday, Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan will hold rallies in Castle Rock and Johnstown, the last visits by a member of the Republican ticket to Colorado this year.

Obama will hold what is expected to be his final rally in Colorado this campaign season Sunday at a community college.

Where?

In the same city as his January visit that started it all: Aurora.

John Ingold: 303-954-1068, jingold@denverpost.com or twitter.com/john_ingold

Staff writer Allison Sherry contributed to this report.

About the poll

This SurveyUSA poll was conducted Sunday through Wednesday by telephone in the voice of a professional announcer. Respondent households were selected at random, using a Random Digit Dialed sample provided by Survey Sampling of Fairfield, Conn., unless otherwise indicated on the individual poll report. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.8 percentage points. All respondents heard the questions asked identically.
Where necessary, responses were weighted according to age, gender, ethnic origin, geographical area and number of adults and number of voice telephone lines in the household, so that the sample would reflect the demographic proportions in the population, using most recent census estimates. The survey was done by SurveyUSA of Clifton, N.J.

Next stop, Colorado

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden and rivals Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have paid plenty of attention to Colorado in the past year. A look back at the candidates' visits.

Jan. 26: OBAMA — Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora

Feb. 4: ROMNEY —Colorado Springs

Feb. 6: ROMNEY — Arapahoe High School in Centennial

Feb. 7: ROMNEY— Auraria in Denver

April 24: OBAMA — University of Colorado at Boulder

May 9: ROMNEY — Fort Lupton

May 23: OBAMA — Air Force Academy graduation in Colorado Springs

May 29: ROMNEY — Craig

July 10: ROMNEY — Central High School in Grand Junction

Aug. 2: ROMNEY — Jefferson County Fairgrounds in Golden

Aug. 2: ROMNEY — The Republican Governors Association in Basalt

Aug. 8: OBAMA — Grand Junction High School in Grand Junction

Aug. 8: OBAMA — Auraria in Denver

Aug. 9: OBAMA — Colorado State Fairgrounds in Pueblo

Aug. 13: RYAN — Lakewood High School in Lakewood

Aug. 28: OBAMA — Colorado State University in Fort Collins

Sept. 2: OBAMA— University of Colorado at Boulder

Sept. 6: RYAN — Colorado Springs airport in Colorado Springs

Sept. 13: OBAMA — Lions Park in Golden

Sept. 23: ROMNEY — D'Evelyn High School in Denver

Sept. 24: ROMNEY — Pueblo airport in Pueblo

Sept. 26: RYAN — Fort Collins

Sept. 26: RYAN — America the Beautiful Park in Colorado Springs

Oct. 1: ROMNEY — Wings Over the Rockies museum in Denver

Oct. 3: ROMNEY — University of Denver in Denver for the first debate

Oct. 3: OBAMA — DU for the debate

Oct. 4: OBAMA — Sloan's Lake park in Denver

Oct. 17: BIDEN — Island Grove Regional Park in Greeley

Oct. 21: RYAN — Colorado Springs airport in Colorado Springs

Oct. 22: RYAN — Pueblo West

Oct. 22: RYAN — Fort Lewis College in Durango

Oct. 22: RYAN — Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction

Oct. 23: ROMNEY and Ryan — Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison

Oct. 24: OBAMA — City Park in Denver

Nov. 1: RYAN — Island Grove Regional Park in Greeley

Nov. 1: OBAMA — University of Colorado at Boulder

Nov. 2: RYAN — Montrose airport in Montrose

Nov. 3: ROMNEY — Colorado Springs

Nov. 3: ROMNEY — Greenwood Village

Nov. 3: BIDEN — Arvada

Nov. 3: BIDEN — Pueblo

Sunday: OBAMA — Aurora*

Sunday: RYAN — Douglas County Fairgrounds in Castle Rock*

Monday: RYAN — Johnson's Corner in Johnstown*

*Announced campaign stops

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In the November 6 election for President, have you already voted? Will you vote before Election Day? Will you vote on Election Day? Will you not vote? Or are you not yet sure?

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